An archaeologist’s field guide to coffee cansThe year is 1905. You are a prospector in Alaska relaxing in your cabin after a chilly day of working the tailings pile. Craving a cup, you pull a tin of coffee off the shelf. Though you can’t imagine it, that distinctive red can, the one you will later use for your precious supply of nails, will long outlive you. And it will give an archaeologist a good idea of when you made a home in Alaska. The coffee was Hills...

Alaska Science Forum: Late summer arrives in the boreal forestIt's early August, 118 miles from the Arctic Circle. Time for a walk to work. The last time I wrote about hiking through the North Campus of the University of Alaska Fairbanks, summer was a puppy crashing into your shin. Now it has a white muzzle. I note this maturity while moving through a nice chunk of boreal forest in the mile between my workplace and my home. For a lot of reasons, I'm lucky to be able to commu...

Alaska Science Forum: High-tech bird decoy fools flycatchersJulie Hagelin needed a fake bird. She found one in an unexpected place. The biologist for the Alaska Department of Fish and Game is studying the mysterious olive-sided flycatcher, known for its piercing "quick, three beers!" heard above black spruce bogs throughout Alaska. The bird, which weighs as much as a dozen pennies and migrates as far as Bolivia, is declining throughout most of its range in North America. N...

Tracks across Greenland ice, 60 years apartOn top of an ice body more than two miles thick, Chris Polashenski last summer hoped to find a candy wrapper that might have fallen from Carl Benson's pocket 60 years ago. As he repeated the Alaska glaciologist's measurements on the Greenland ice sheet, Polashenski realized that six decades of snowfall, windstorms and glacier movement had wiped out evidence of Benson's passage. "Carl's footprints were entombed in ...

Tracking salmon to their birth streamsStrontium is a trace element and mineral people use to make glow-in-the-dark paints and toothpaste for sensitive teeth. In research for his college degree, Sean Brennan used strontium's unique qualities to track salmon in an Alaska river. At Brennan's Ph.D. defense at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, adviser Matthew Wooller praised Brennan's ambitious plan and his execution of it up and down the many webs of th...

The mystery of 53 dead caribou in the Alaska RangeForty-two years ago, an Army helicopter pilot flying over a tundra plateau saw a group of caribou. Thinking something looked weird, he circled for a closer look. The animals, dozens of them, were dead. The pilot reported what he saw to the Alaska Department of Fish and Game. The caribou, 48 adults and five calves, were lying in a group. The way their carcasses rested showed no signs that the animals had been runni...

Ever-changing: the number of Alaskan glaciers A glaciologist once wrote that the number of glaciers in Alaska “is estimated at (greater than) 100,000.” That fuzzy number, perhaps written in passive voice for a reason, might be correct. But it depends upon how you count. Another glaciologist saw an example of the confusion when he visited Yakutat Glacier. Yakutat, near the Alaska town of the same name, is a withering glacier that calves into a deep lake of its...

Ever-changing: the number of Alaskan glaciers A glaciologist once wrote that the number of glaciers in Alaska “is estimated at (greater than) 100,000.” That fuzzy number, perhaps written in passive voice for a reason, might be correct. But it depends upon how you count. Another glaciologist saw an example of the confusion when he visited Yakutat Glacier. Yakutat, near the Alaska town of the same name, is a withering glacier that calves into a deep lake of its...

Arctic Alaska shines in a different lightSlicing through the top quarter of the Alaska map, the Arctic Circle marks the boundary of perpetual light. North of the line, the sun won't set on summer solstice. But somehow the breezy, treeless tundra of Barrow has a more arctic feel than Fort Yukon, also pole-ward of the line but home to dense spruce forests and Alaska's all-time high temperature of 100 degrees. A more "ecologically sound" definition of the A...

Old-growth spruce destroyed at research siteThis spring, John Yarie learned of the death of the oldest living things he knew. Since 1988, the silviculture professor at the University of Alaska Fairbanks had measured and fertilized a stand of giant spruce trees on a hillside south of Fairbanks. A few weeks ago, forest technicians visited the site and found that one dozen trees had been cut down, possibly by "wood poachers." "I'm just really disappointed some...